Automobile theft throughout the world and particularly in the United States of America has arisen to an alarming level. A vehicle is stolen approximately every nineteen seconds within America. In addition, the frequency of car-jacking of automobiles and drivers entering automobiles is sharply increasing.
In the past, fuel cut-off devices have been integrated into the fuel line of an automobile to reduce the ease of theft:. These devices generally include a valve for stopping the flow of fuel to an engine where the valve is controlled by an operating means mounted proximate to the driver's compartment of the vehicle. These fuel cut-off devices are usually configured by a manufacturer to incorporate a pre-set and standardized code access sequence. The standardized and pre-set code access sequences used within these devices soon become known by the criminal elements rendering the automobile auto-theft devices useless. In addition, technical mechanisms are readily available to the criminal elements for neutralizing the operation of the known fuel cut-off devices.
The types of known automobile: anti-theft devices include U.S. Pat. No. 5,045,837 to Gosker et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 3,756,341 to Tonkowich; U.S. Pat. No. 2,550,499 to Bayard; U.S. Pat. No. 4,991,683 to Garreto; and U.S. Pat. No. 3,834,484 to Sangster. These patents in general disclose devices which are inflexible and which fail to permit an individual to personalize or modify an access code for an automobile anti-theft device. In addition, these known automobile anti-theft devices lack a security mechanism preventing tampering by criminals. Furthermore, these automobile anti-theft devices and/or fuel cut-off systems are "non-passive" requiring entry of a code or the manipulation of a key or a switch. These devices are therefore inconvenient to a user, when the systems/devices by their nature are easily defeated by a criminal.